MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

2012 - Missouri Years II

Raymore (continued)

We finalized a contract with Nancy’s mother, made a large down payment and headed back to Mississippi to get our home on the market. The contract was for us to move and make the final payment when the Mississippi house was sold. We didn’t know when it might sell, but we were going to move that Fall before our winter hiatus to Florida, regardless of whether the house was sold or not. As it so happened the house sold in a month’s time and the new owners gave us one month to get out.

We had to have a plan. What could we keep and still fit into 1400 square feet of space. We had read an article on downsizing which gave three simple rules: you could keep 1/3, you had to give away 1/3, and you had to throw away 1/3. After 29 years in the same house, this was not going to be easy and it wasn’t. We had taken measurements of all the rooms in the Missouri house. I made scaled drawing of each room and made scaled cutouts of our furniture. From that we knew exactly what furniture would fit, where it would fit and what had to go. I don’t know how we matched up to those two rules, but we did give a lot of stuff to charitable places and gave a trailer full of stuff to our handy man. The throw away was even harder, many mementoes were hauled to the dumping ground along with things we should have thrown away years ago.